How To Be Productive, Not Just Busy

Have you ever had one of those days where you have been so busy, you have been so focused for the entire day and when you have come to the end of it you just think to yourself ‘wow that has been an extremely busy day for me’. You might be tired, you might be exhausted, your head might be frazzled, your eyes might red and you just think, ‘that has definitely been an incredibly busy day for me.’

Now, have you ever been there? I have been there probably a thousand times over in my lifetime, and now by adding some structure to my day I now know that being busy does not necessarily mean being productive. We can all be busy rushing around and doing things and indeed looking like we are being proactive, but are we doing the right things so that at the end of the day we have some kind of an outcome? Have we achieved a set of goals we set out for the day? No? Because if you haven’t, then what is it that we are doing wrong? Or rather the question should be, what should we be doing right to ensure that we have a sense of purpose and a sense of moving forward in our daily lives?

Running around being busy doesn’t actually achieve anything unless you have a sense of where it is you want to go, a sense of clarity of what you want to do when you wake up that morning. So how do you find that clarity? How do you structure your day? How do you decide how long you are going to be busy for at various points in the day? How much time are you going to allocate to each individual task within the day? Do we even think about that? I remember back in the day, for many years I did not do that. I used to go to work, get to my office, see the amount of work I had to do and frantically get my head down and by the end of the day I would think I have had a really busy day. The truth is though I probably didn’t achieve as much on those days compared to the days where I would walk into work and think to myself, ‘so let me decide what I am going to do today, let me decide firstly what is important and what is urgent.’ The two are not necessarily the same thing; what is important is not necessarily what is urgent.

So let me give you an example. Someone may walk into your office or you receive an email or a letter through the post saying, ‘this needs to be done now or this needs t be done by the deadline;’ but even if you met the deadline and completed the work, what would be the outcome of this? Do we ever think about the outcomes? Nowadays that is exactly what I do. So I recognise that stuff over here sounds really urgent and you have either put pressure on yourself to complete it or someone else has put pressure on you to complete it, but we actually forget to analyse and evidence whether doing that one thing would actually have any movement towards the desired outcome. So just because something is urgent, do not tell you yourself that it is necessarily productive to do it. Now there are certain urgent things that need to be done aren’t there? There are certain things that will daily come across your desk or come up in your daily life that have to do done there and then because if you do not do them there will be consequences for no doing them. A lot of things thought that we put on the pressure of time are as important or as productive as you might think.

So let us now switch our attention to those things that are important but not necessarily urgent. So what is important? The important thing is all those jobs that actually take you somewhere, the jobs that lead you forward, the jobs that actually shift you from where you are now to where you want to be or even just closer to that destination. Those are the important jobs as they are taking you closer to your goal, whatever that goal may be in that moment of time. If the task is moving you forward in the right direction then that is the task that is more important than the one telling you to do it right now. Now obviously when it comes to prioritising you are going to look for those tasks that are both important and urgent and get them done first as they move you closer to your destination and of course they need doing in the here and now.

So structure your day every single day, and I cannot emphasize enough the need to have some kind of a diary or a notepad where you do your ‘to do list’, but this is not just a list of things to do per say. I always put at the top of my list the tasks that are both important and that are urgent, then I look at the tasks that are important only and then finally I will look at the tasks that are urgent. So with that sense of priority I will then know what needs to be done first. On top of that I put down the tasks that are the most unpleasant and I get on with that first. Brian Tracy wrote a book called Eat That Frog and what he says in that book is, all the tasks that you don’t really want to do; get them done first. If you get those tasks done at the start of the day it will make the rest of the day seem easier and of course it will keep moving your forward towards your goal. 

The other thing I like to do when I structure my day is I add I little bracket next to each one of the tasks and I estimate how long each one of those tasks will take me to complete, e.g. if I take I day where I have a number of booked calls, I will know roughly how long each of those calls should take and therefore this allows me to structure the call in such a way so that there is no wastage of time. The conversations can stay focused. So add time allocations to each task so you can structure your time effectively and efficiently; ask yourself how much time are you going to allow to complete each task?

So when you structure your day you will also find free time within your day so the day is not solidly all about work, you can actually build in some time to reconnect with people that perhaps you haven’t spoke to for a few days; those loved ones near you, your friends and family. I personally love this process of structuring, understanding what is important and not important, prioritising accordingly and then I love the fact that now I put in a time slot of how much time I am going to allocate to each one of the tasks because essentially what it is allowing me to do is free up time so everything is not just about work. Now I am finding whenever I am working less, I am busier and more productive in that period because it is laser sharp focused and laser sharp clarity and it allows me the free time to make other phone calls and reconnect with other people.

So try that for yourselves. Understand what is urgent and what is important, differentiate between the two, make a list of priorities of tasks, put the tasks on top that are urgent and important (don’t forget to Eat The Frog!), and of course allocate time slots for each one of those tasks that you have got so you know that you will keep to a fairly rigid timetable and you watch how much free time you end up making up as a consequence of having this structure.